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Ricardo Darín has become the somewhat unlikely middle-aged poster boy of Argentine cinema of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. In the Argentine context, this same period is marked by the economic crisis of 2001 and the celebrations of the country’s bicentenary in 2010, both of which raise important questions about national identity. This article will examine the films Darín made with Juan José Campanella and Pablo Trapero in order to consider the ways in which his star status is used as a way to reflect or comment upon certain questions that seem to occupy the national psyche and to engage with forms of masculinity, whether that be to represent them, reify them, or indeed do both simultaneously. In the four films he made with Campanella, Darín plays an affable middle-class man who is somehow an outsider. The fact that by the end of the films all four characters have found some closure and experience a sense of a new beginning attests to the strength of middle-class masculinity as an identity category. Both his characters die at the end of the two films with Trapero. These characters are also outsiders, but Trapero uses Darín’s star status to draw attention to broader social issues within Argentine society. Ultimately, both directors rely upon Darín’s off-screen persona to aid characterization and link their protagonists to national issues and questions of national identities.

The emergence of the figure of the new woman marked one of the most significant social changes of the twentieth century. Although expressed in the singular, the term embraces a whole host of subjectivities and is associated with a range of symbols and identities, all of which were negotiated by individuals in their own way. Maruja Mallo and Norah Borges present images of the mujer moderna that show the ways in which that particular identity was negotiated by Spanish and Argentine women in the 1920s and 1930s. Both artists, albeit in very different ways, reject a simplistic depiction of the modern woman and refuse to reduce her to a rebellious figure; instead they show her position in relation to wider society. Their images celebrate the new found freedoms of women and place these within a trajectory of women’s history, whilst simultaneously problematizing the ways in which women in Spain and Argentina were caught between tradition and modernity.

The Argentine visual artist Norah Borges (1901-1998) travelled to Europe with her family and began her artistic career in Switzerland and Spain at just 17 years of age. She arrived in Europe at a time of war but also at a moment in which avant-garde movements were questioning the future direction of visual representation. Her development as an artist within this context would prove decisive and Norah developed a style of her own by drawing eclectically upon Cubism, Expressionism and Futurism. She also combined elements of these movements with influences from more traditional forms of painting, evading categorization by any particular Modernist school or ¬-ism. This fusion of elements resulted in her work being hailed as the epitome of the Spanish avant-garde movement ultraísmo, and getting published in some of the most important avant-garde periodicals of the time. This essay seeks to explore the influences of Futurism in Norah's early prints and considers the longer-lasting effects the movement had on her style. It builds upon previous studies of Norah's early prints, which have provided detailed analyses of the influences of Expressionism and Cubism, and aims to draw out the elements of Futurism contained in her earliest works. Whilst the emphasis is on the influences of Futurism, the intention of the analysis is to underscore the artist's successful blending of diverse styles in images that resonated with the wider concerns of various avant-garde movements.